The WHO is a forum to coordinate strategy and exchange information. Obviously, this requires a minimum of good faith, which seems to be difficult for some countries (yes, particularly dictatorships). But even then, it is better to have them within, collaborating on their terms, than to leave them outside, in which case it would be even harder to get any information out of them.
So yes, China will lie, which will make life worse for epidemiologists and governments across the globe, but not as worse as it could be with China being entirely uncooperative.
It is not the world police, and it won’t come anywhere and do anything against the local government’s wishes. Otherwise the screams world be even louder, and justifiably so.
I tend to agree with this sentiment, however I'm always on the fence as to if acting on no new information is better than acting on false or misleading information. If you can't trust the source the data is almost worthless. Anyways, that's for self reported information. Getting any direct access to gather independent information I'd say is nearly always valuable unless it's also targeted with disinformation campaigns.
They are working with what they have, which comes from governments and governmental health agencies. If they don’t have information, they say ‘we don’t know’, even though everyone knows that the most likely scenario involves emergence in China.
If one wants them to be able to coerce information out of China, then by definition it would need to be more powerful.
Yeah, neither is good.
> If you can't trust the source the data is almost worthless.
It’s worse than worthless, because you are expecting disinformation. Though to be fair you can also get disinformation from sources you trust...
> Getting any direct access to gather independent information I'd say is nearly always valuable unless it's also targeted with disinformation campaigns.
That’s why it’s good to have inspectors. But even then, there are limits. Inspectors usually cannot go anywhere they please (otherwise nobody would sign that treaty), so it’s always possible to hide things from them.
Our governments have also the right to be critical when reading reports, particularly based on data from untrustworthy countries. We elect them to do their job, and that job involves quite a bit of critical thinking when dealing with other countries. They also have experts and often scientific cooperation agreements that can complement the WHO.
So yes, the WHO is imperfect. Perfecting it is quite difficult without causing countries to drop out, and countries should not be reliant on only one source anyway.
Of course, cooperation is always possible, but what would be the extent of cooperation between say China, Russia, and the US if a new treaty were signed today?
Authority is derived from something being something that everyone has. In the past, achieving that goal practically guaranteed authenticity to within a comfortable enough quanta for everyone to work with.
With more advanced remote sensing equipment, the decreased cost to publish, reach one can attain for relatively little cost nowadays, that is no longer a luxury we can all afford to continue to entertain. We must all see with our own eyes. In the case that is frustrated or made impossible, it should not a surprise that the world acts as badly as it does.
This is why the collective lie is the most powerful weapon fielded by modern civilization, and why there is such a jockeying for control of what the definition of allowable evidence is. Perception management is a weapon of mass destruction, and should be called out for what it is.
Government is just people trying to do triage, discern signal from noise, coordination, move the ball forward... with a bunch of other people.
People expect too much. It's amazing anything works at all. We should all marvel at the progress we've somehow achieved thus far.
While striving too do better, of course.
Their problem is not that their data is bad. Their problem is that they are acting like a political entity when they are supposed to be an impartial, data driven, scientific organization. For example, the WHO railed against common sense risk mitigation strategies such as travel restrictions (i.e. isolate China) early on with COVID when they were precisely what was needed to reduce risk. They did so for political or monetary reasons (closing borders harms economies). Xi latched on to this and used it as justification to keep borders open. Unsurprisingly, COVID subsequently spread rapidly between China and countries that had maintained open borders with China.
It is not the WHO's job to consider the economic ramifications of their policy suggestions: that is the job of politicians. It is their job to put forward suggestions for how to limit the spread of disease regardless of the impact to economies or governments.
Before the pandemic, I thought the WHO was a relatively capable organization. But from what I witnessed they just seem like a prestige farm used as a stepping stone to more lucrative careers.
On the one hand, there's a part of me that imagines a world of completely neutral sensor grids that absolutely everyone is able to tap into for reading from, no questions asked, no restrictions. Anyone can see anything, from anywhere, period.
Imagine this was set up and anyone who knew how to insert state into the system just got disapoofed.
So you now have a reality where we're all capable of receiving the exact same information, and operatinng on it as we desire. The Executive decision of free will literally becomes what or where to pay attention to or where to invest your effort.
However, this ideal setup wouldn't last 15 minutes before nodes started to organize into meta-blocks devoting their cycles to getting other undecided nodes to devote their cycles where the meta-group thinks that attention is best directed. This creates information asymmetry, which enables perception management. To hell with mentioning or lining out for the Undirected that there are alternatives or an opportunity cost.
So even in the most ideal case where all the hard work is done to make it so everyone, everywhere can magically remote sense the same data, I can't architectually guarantee a proof against perception management.
Let us now shift to the opposite side of the spectrum.
You only have your own eyes, and your only means of long range remote sensing is by dedicating other people to head over there and collect it, and report back. Magically assume everyone is okay with these individuals doing so with no strings attached. (That never happens, but lets's assume). Also assume these people are selfless and amazingly perfectly rerceptive with a talent for getting across aspects of what they see.
You end up at the same problem. The hand that sets the bounds or priorities of those people collecting information represents the true seat of power, and de facto perception management. In a centralized system, you'd confer godlike power over the lower rungs to the people at the top.
The only way I can see it working out in some modicum of a better way is to ensure distributed sourcing of prioritization decisions. I.e. localized populations of these metaphorical informational go getters, with priorities set as some function arrived at by the consuming population.
Then again, you run into the problem of our current media/press edifice: the audience picks the facts by collective editorial discretion, and furthermore, you emergently get meta-nodes that pop up and rate authoritativeness by how often similar renderings of the same inputs pop up. Those meta-nodes, and the consumers of information feed into an overall balancing act. The meta-nodes try to build audiences by tailoring the facts they provide for maximized odds of acceptance by their influenced audience.
So in no way do I find any way to reconcile a system that includes authoritative weighting that results in a low probability of perceptual management arising. It's an emergent property of any network medium of information propagation.
This suggests, given it's inevitability of arising, we need to thoughtfully structure something around, enshrining information propagation as a first order infrastructure (which we kind of already have), but also relegating some form of negative outcome to poor performance as a neutral information propagator, which again, we already have. People are starting to distrust media outlets and other authoritative sources due to the bad information received, just as Nation's are apparently placing the WHO's credibility at arms length due to their proven unwillingness to research theories that reflect poorly on their subject.
So yeah. We got what we've got, and with a blank slate we'll end up in the same place even with a massive change to the fundamental architecture of human social consciousness.
It seems to stem from some some deeper intrinsic instinctual underpinning of successful life forms that I"m not really good at imagining outside of.
A lot of words to say I don't know I guess, but I gave it the good old college try.
The motivation you suggest may apply to some people, sometimes, in some places but certainly not all people in all governments much and perhaps even most of the time.
Self interest, corruption, the desire for power, the desire for conquest and theft and a complete disregard for their citizenry and indeed humanity in general are unfortunately all too common with those who get into the governance business.